bjackman (u/bjackman)

bjackman commented on Nvidia DGX Spark nvidia.com/en-us/products... · Posted by u/janandonly

IshKebab · 3 days ago

I just googled it and the first result was one in stock for £2200. That's including tax. I assume $1999 is excluding tax. Without tax and converted to dollars it's $2470.

From other less reliable sources like eBay they are more like £1800.

bjackman · 3 days ago

Huh, you are right. I googled it yesterday too but I guess I had confirmation bias and happened to stumble across an old price and go "yep still 4k".

Well, I'm glad to be wrong on his!

bjackman commented on Nvidia DGX Spark nvidia.com/en-us/products... · Posted by u/janandonly

hereme888 · 4 days ago

FP4-sparse (TFLOPS) | Price | $/TF4s

5090: 3352 | 1999 | 0.60

Thor: 2070 | 3499 | 1.69

Spark: 1000 | 3999 | 4.00

____________

FP8-dense (TFLOPS) | Price | $/TF8d (4090s have no FP4)

4090 : 661 | 1599 | 2.42

4090 Laptop: 343 | vary | -

____________

Geekbench 6 (compute score) | Price | $/100k

4090: 317800 | 1599 | 503

5090: 387800 | 1999 | 516

M4 Max: 180700 | 1999 | 1106

M3 Ultra: 259700 | 3999 | 1540

____________

Apple NPU TOPS (not GPU-comparable)

M4 Max: 38

M3 Ultra: 36

bjackman · 4 days ago

Note you cannot actually get a 5090 for $1999 that's just the RRP. I believe they actually cost $4k

bjackman commented on Japan has opened its first osmotic power plant theguardian.com/world/202... · Posted by u/pseudolus

p1mrx · 5 days ago

> it is expected to generate about 880,000 kilowatt hours of electricity each year

100 kW, in sensible units.

bjackman · 5 days ago

This one is pretty annoying coz even if you support the idea of "kilowatt hours", it's common to discuss power station capacity in terms of Watts (plus for journalists the obligatory "this is enough to power N homes / a city the size of Coventry"). So it's like they're deliberately choosing to be obscure here!

bjackman commented on Japan has opened its first osmotic power plant theguardian.com/world/202... · Posted by u/pseudolus

bjornsing · 5 days ago

In 1998 when I was in high school I dreamt up this kind of power plant and asked my physics teacher where the power really came from. Not happy with his answer I asked a university physics Q&A service [1]. Not happy with their answer either I did a masters in engineering physics and kept asking this question whenever I got the chance. Never got a really good answer. But I’m glad to see it works.

1. https://fragelada.fysik.org/index.php?amne=Energi&stage=&key...

bjackman · 5 days ago

My instinct here is just to wave it away saying "I bet the temperature of the system falls when you do this, and you need a minimum temperature for it to work over a given salinity gradient". Is it not that simple?

bjackman commented on Google's Liquid Cooling chipsandcheese.com/p/goog... · Posted by u/giuliomagnifico

acyou · 5 days ago

This is one of those cases where we fly by and don't think much about it because we live in a plentiful environment. The more detailed we get, the more we realize that everything has a cost, and wasting water is not free as in beer. Have we also considered the disposal costs of wastewater?

I used to live in a place where water was infinite. Fast forward 20 years, now it's not anymore, the fish bearing watersheds ultimately bear the price, but everyone is still unmetered and there isn't low flow anything. If you piss away precious resources for no good reason and claim it's not wasteful, shame on you.

bjackman · 5 days ago

Yes, I have considered the disposal costs of wastewater! Yes, I still think importing hundreds of stainless steel widgets from China and then having a plumber spend who knows how many hours installing them is almost certainly a net negative. If you piss away precious resources doing that then shame on you.

bjackman commented on Gemini 2.5 Flash Image developers.googleblog.com... · Posted by u/meetpateltech

bibabaloo · 5 days ago

Why take photos at all if you can just imagine them?

bjackman · 5 days ago

Well, that goes to the heart of my point. I take pictures because I value how literal they are. I enjoy the fact that they directly capture the arrangement of light in the moment I took them. That

So yeah, if I'm gonna then upscale them or "repair" them using generative AI, then it's a bit pointless to take them in the first place.

bjackman commented on Google's Liquid Cooling chipsandcheese.com/p/goog... · Posted by u/giuliomagnifico

acyou · 6 days ago

It's on the same level as people using incandescent light bulbs. Well we clear 160k Euros after taxes and have public medical care, and electricity is 10c/kWh here, so why does it matter what bulbs we use?

We live in an area surrounded by grass fed cows, so what does it matter if we throw away 3/4 of our steak?

Without regard to how plentiful resources are in our particular area, being needlessly wasteful is in bad taste more than anything. It's a lack of appreciation of the value of what we have.

For water specifically - it is generally speaking the most valuable resource available, we just don't appreciate it because we happen to have a lot of it.

bjackman · 5 days ago

It's nothing like either of those things because both of those things have harms to other people and those harms scale linearly with the amount of consumption. Wasting steak isn't problematic because you run out of cows it's problematic because of the climate impact of raising them.

Saying that saving water is "about respect" or something is idiotic. Saving water is about ensuring there's enough water to go around. This is something you need to do in places where water is scarce and not where it isn't. And if you waste time and energy on saving water you are ultimately making the world poorer.

Obviously I'm simplifying things by talking in absolutes here, but what I said above about "the margin at which it makes sense" gets at the truth of the matter. Installing water-saving taps in Zürich is almost certainly a net harm to the environment.

bjackman commented on Gemini 2.5 Flash Image developers.googleblog.com... · Posted by u/meetpateltech

notsylver · 5 days ago

I digitised our family photos but a lot of them were damaged (shifted colours, spills, fingerprints on film, spots) that are difficult to correct for so many images. I've been waiting for image gen to catch up enough to be able to repair them all in bulk without changing details, especially faces. This looks very good at restoring images without altering details or adding them where they are missing, so it might finally be time.

bjackman · 5 days ago

I don't really understand the point of this usecase. Like, can't you also imagine what the photos might look like without the damage? Same with AI upscaling in phone cameras... if I want a hypothetical idea of what something in the distance might look like, I can just... imagine it?

I think we will eventually have AI based tools that are just doing what a skilled human user would do in Photoshop, via tool-use. This would make sense to me. But just having AI generate a new image with imagined details just seems like waste of time.

bjackman commented on Google's Liquid Cooling chipsandcheese.com/p/goog... · Posted by u/giuliomagnifico

bri3d · 6 days ago

The CDU is inside the datacenter and strictly liquid to liquid exchange. It transfers heat from the rack block's coolant to the facility coolant. The facility then provides outdoor heat exchange for the facility coolant, which is sometimes accomplished using open-loop evaporative cooling (spraying down the cooling towers). All datacenters have some form of facility cooling, whether there's a CDU and local water cooling or not, so it's not particularly relevant.

The whole AI-water conversation is sort of tiring, since water just moves to more or less efficient parts or locations in the water cycle - I think a "total runtime energy consumption" metric would be much more useful if it were possible to accurately price in water-related externalities (ie - is a massive amount of energy spent moving water because a datacenter evaporates it? or is it no big deal?). And the whole thing really just shows how inefficient and inaccurately priced the market for water is, especially in the US where water rights, price, and the actual utility of water in a given location are often shockingly uncorrelated.

bjackman · 6 days ago

Even without AI the whole water conservation topic is kinda silly.

The margin at which it makes sense to save water varies wildly by location, but the cultural dominance of the western USA infiltrates everything.

Here in Zürich, my office briefly installed water saving taps. This is a city of less than half a million where the government maintains 1,200 fountains that spew drinkable water 24/7. But someone at the California HQ said saving water is important and someone at the Swiss subsidiary said yes sir we'll look into it right away sir.

bjackman commented on Pixel 10 Phones blog.google/products/pixe... · Posted by u/gotmedium

ElijahLynn · 11 days ago

Yay, it has native wireless charging via Qi2, AKA Pixelsnap. The rumors on the internet were that you needed a special case to use the wireless charging. But that is not true after all and those rumors were false.

You can just plop a Qi2 charger right on your phone and it will charge! Only bummer is that the 10 pro charges at 15w while the 10 pro XL charges at 25w. And I really prefer the smaller phones that fit in my pockets. Not some huge monster phone.

bjackman · 11 days ago

I recently discovered Pixel 7 (maybe older too, I dunno) is actually Qi compatible it just doesn't have the magnets to lock in place.

But if you have a case with those magnets in, it works great. And it turns out QuadLok cases (which I can generally recommend for cyclists) are compatible.

So now I just plonk my phone against the wall and it charges on an Apple MagSafe charger I mounted. This is actually really nice, turns out it's really convenient to have your phone in a fixed position, also not taking up any surface space!

Always thought wireless charging was a bit of a gimmick but with the magnets it's genuinely useful.